The Paris Agreement and The New Logic of International Climate Politics

The Paris Agreement and the new logic of
international climate politics
ROBERT FALKNER *
On 12 December 2015, 195 countries reached agreement on a new climate treaty

that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described as ‘a monumental triumph for
people and our planet’.1 The Paris Agreement represented a remarkable reversal
of fortune for the UN-sponsored climate negotiations. After adopting the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, which estab-
lished the objective of preventing dangerous human-induced climate change by
stabilizing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere, the inter-
national community spent over two decades negotiating legally binding rules
on how to rein in global emissions. But despite the creation of the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol and instruments such as the Clean Development Mechanism, emissions
of the main GHGs (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) rose steadily over
this period. The 2009 Copenhagen conference, intended to create a more effec-
tive successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, collapsed in acrimony, leading many
observers to conclude that multilateral climate diplomacy had reached a dead end.
Has the Paris Agreement successfully broken the ‘global warming gridlock’?2 And
does it stand a chance of bringing global GHG emissions under control?
This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the
Parties (COP-21) to the UNFCCC, held in Paris in December 2015. It argues
that the Paris Agreement does indeed break new ground in international climate
policy. COP-21 brought to an end over 20 years of UN negotiations focused on a
misguided approach of establishing mandatory emission reductions. Instead, the
Paris Agreement acknowledges the primacy of domestic politics in climate change
and allows countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitiga-
tion. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared
and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased
through a process of ‘naming and shaming’. By sidestepping the distributional
* The author would like to thank Michael Jacobs for stimulating this effort to think through the new logic of
the Paris Agreement, and Rob Bailey, Fergus Green and the anonymous reviewers of the journal for their
helpful comments on an earlier draft.
1
‘COP-21: UN chief hails new climate change agreement as “monumental triumph”’, UN News Centre,
12 Dec. 2015, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=52802#.Vx3cdKv87ww. (Unless otherwise
noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 11 July 2016.)
2
David G. Victor, Global warming gridlock: creating more effective strategies for protecting the planet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
International Affairs 92: 5 (2016) 1107–1125

© 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Robert Falkner
conflicts that were inherent in the post-Kyoto negotiations, the Paris Agreement
manages to remove one of the biggest barriers to international climate cooperation.
It recognizes that none of the major powers can be forced into drastic emissions
cuts. However, instead of leaving mitigation efforts to an entirely bottom-up
logic, it embeds country pledges in an international system of climate account-
ability and a ‘ratchet’ mechanism. In this sense, the Paris climate summit heralds
the beginning of a new era in international climate politics, one that offers the
chance of more durable international cooperation.
While the Paris Agreement thus establishes a more realistic approach to inter-
national cooperation on climate change mitigation, it is far from clear whether
it can actually deliver on the urgent need to decarbonize the global economy.
According to analysis by the UNFCCC Secretariat, the national climate policy
pledges submitted in the run-up to the Paris conference would result in global
warming of 2.7°C above pre-industrial levels, and this estimate is based on the
optimistic assumption that all national pledges will be fully implemented.3 The
past record of climate policies around the world suggests that governments have
a tendency to express lofty aspirations but avoid tough decisions. For the Paris
Agreement to make a difference, the new logic of ‘pledge and review’ and the
subsequent ‘ratchet’ will need to mobilize international and domestic pressure and
generate realistic expectations for more substantial climate policies worldwide. It
matters, therefore, whether the Paris Agreement’s new approach can be made to
work.
This article offers a first-cut analysis of the new global governance approach
enshrined in the Paris Agreement, focusing on the mitigation challenge. It begins
by examining (in the first section) the changing context of international climate
politics between the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and the 2015 Paris conference. The
second section reviews the main elements of the Paris Agreement, and the third
section analyses how the new logic of the climate regime can work and what its
limitations are. The final section sums up the argument and offers an outlook on
the next steps in the international climate process.
From Copenhagen to Paris: the changing context of climate politics

The international community agreed in 2010 that it would seek to limit the rise
in the planet’s average air temperature to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial
levels. It has been widely accepted for some time that global warming above that
level should be avoided, although some scientists argue that this target does not take
into account the much larger heat absorption by oceans and that it should there-
fore be lowered or abandoned altogether in favour of a broader set of measures.4
To have a reasonable chance of staying below the 2°C limit, the world needs
to achieve a drastic reversal in current GHG emission trends. With some gases
3
UNFCCC Secretariat, Synthesis report on the aggregate effect of the intended nationally determined contributions, FCCC/
CP/2015/7, 30 Oct. 2015, http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/07.pdf.
4
David G. Victor and Charles F. Kennel, ‘Climate policy: ditch the 2°C warming goal’, Nature 514: 7520, 2014,
pp. 30–31.
1108
International Affairs 92: 5, 2016
Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics
(e.g. carbon dioxide) staying in the atmosphere for a century and future emissions
forecast to rise if no action is taken, globally coordinated measures are needed
to bring emissions under control. The United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) estimates that global GHG emission levels, which were at 52.7 gigatonnes
(GT) of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2014, should be brought down to 48 GT by
2025, and 42 GT in 2030. Carbon dioxide emissions alone will need to be reduced
to net zero by 2060–75 (from 35.5 GT in 2014).5
The magnitude of the international policy challenge is hard to overstate. Most
of the global carbon dioxide emissions, the biggest source of the human-generated
greenhouse effect, result from the combustion of coal, oil and gas. It was the
harnessing of these fossil fuels that, together with the technological innovations of
the industrial revolution, made the modern industrial economy possible. To avert
the threat of runaway global warming, the global economy will need to be weaned
off carbon-intensive fuels. Unsurprisingly, therefore, global warming is a uniquely
challenging—some might say ‘wicked’6—global policy problem. Whereas other
forms of pollution control require only minor changes to industrial processes, the
entire industrial system will need to be re-engineered to achieve a decarbonization
of the global economy. The good news is that many of the technologies that can
bring about this transition to the low-carbon economy already exist, from renew-
able energy sources (e.g. solar, wind) to improvements in energy efficiency. Some
innovations, such as carbon capture and storage, are on the horizon but are yet to
be applied on a commercial scale, while others (e.g. high-capacity nanobatteries,
synthetic algae) may emerge only after substantial investments. Even so, replacing
fossil fuels will prove more difficult in some sectors (e.g. air travel) than others,
and the world’s existing energy, transport and urban infrastructures have already
locked in decades of future carbon emissions. Despite the potential co-benefits
(e.g. improvements in air quality and health) that low-carbon investments are
likely to yield,7 the cost of taking carbon out of global production, trade and
investment is unprecedented in the history of environmental politics.
The political challenges are no less daunting. Although all major emitters have
made a public commitment to fighting global warming, it has proved difficult
to translate this normative engagement into collective action. One facet of the
problem is that while climate change mitigation requires considerable investment
in the short run, the benefits of stabilizing the global climate will materialize
only in the medium to long run. This makes it difficult for governments to justify
significant upfront expenditure, particularly given the brevity of electoral cycles.
5
UNEP, The emissions gap report 2015: a UNEP synthesis report (Nairobi: UNEP, Nov. 2015). Carbon dioxide
equivalent describes the global warming potential for a mixture of GHGs, which include carbon dioxide, the
main source of global warming, but also methane and nitrous oxide. ‘Net zero’ emissions refers to a balance
between carbon dioxide emissions and their reabsorption through sinks (e.g. forests) or technologies that
extract carbon dioxide from the air.
6
Kelly Levin, Ben Cashore, Steven Bernstein and Graeme Auld, ‘Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked
problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change’, Policy Sciences 45: 2, 2012, pp.
123–52.
7
Nicholas Stern, Why are we waiting? The logic, urgency, and promise of tackling climate change (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2015), p. 39.
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Robert Falkner
Furthermore, climate change does not affect all countries equally. Low-lying
island states face an existential threat from rising sea levels while others, especially
countries near the Arctic Circle, may experience greater agricultural output and
easier access to natural resources as a result of the thawing of permafrost. In any
case, the high degree of uncertainty in predicting long-term climate change and
the costs and benefits associated with it makes it difficult for governments to assess
where their national interests lie. For many, then, the most rational line to take
may seem the wait-and-see approach. And even if some emitters were to undertake
major mitigation measures, they could not be certain that other emitters would
reciprocate. Reducing national emissions amounts to the provision of a global
‘public good’ from which all countries would benefit, with concomitant powerful
free-riding incentives. Such uncertainty about the behaviour of other emitters
militates against a strong international agreement. The international politics of
climate change is further complicated by the longstanding divide between devel-
oped and developing countries over how to divide up the mitigation burden,
particularly in view of industrialized countries’ historical responsibility for the
bulk of emissions.8
International society originally tried to get around these difficulties by creating
an international climate regime with mandatory emission reduction targets.9
International institution-building was meant to help build trust between emitters
and reduce the threat of free-riding. Following the example of the successful
international negotiations on ozone layer depletion, climate negotiators set out
in the early 1990s to create the UNFCCC, which established the norm of climate
protection. Building on this universal agreement, they then hoped to negotiate
a series of regulatory instruments that would set ever-stricter targets for GHG
emission reductions. The first such treaty, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, set relatively
modest targets, which required industrialized countries (listed in Annex I) to
reduce emissions by an average of 5 per cent against 1990 levels. Critically, Kyoto
exempted developing countries from similar commitments, thereby establishing
a strong form of differentiation that postponed mitigation action by developing
countries for an unspecified time. In theory, the Kyoto Protocol was meant to be
only a first step. Much like the Montreal Protocol on substances depleting the
ozone layer, it was meant to be revised and strengthened, and the 2009 Copen-
hagen conference was expected to produce a successor agreement that would also
include mitigation efforts by non-Annex I countries, some of which (e.g. China)
had seen their emissions increase dramatically in the years since Kyoto. This was
not how it worked out, however.
In the end, the Annex I countries were able collectively to comply with the
treaty’s provisions, but this did little to slow the rise in global emissions. There
are several reasons why the Kyoto Protocol does not offer a viable approach to
mitigating climate change. First, by setting a static emissions reduction target, the
8
J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley C. Parks, A climate of injustice: global inequality, North–South politics, and climate
policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
9
On the history of the climate negotiations, see Joyeeta Gupta, The history of global climate governance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
1110

regime failed to create dynamic incentives to decarbonize the economy. While
some countries (e.g. Canada) failed to meet the Kyoto targets, others reduced
emissions without making any effort: such was the case for Russia and other post-
Soviet states that experienced de-industrialization after the collapse of commu-
nism. Second, agreeing new targets for a second commitment period after 2012
proved difficult because the focus on legally binding targets had turned the climate
negotiations into a distributional conflict over respective shares of the mitiga-
tion burden. Industrialized countries that had struggled or failed to comply with
Kyoto were reluctant to subject themselves again to another set of rigid targets: as
a result, Canada withdrew from the treaty while Japan and Russia declared they
would not enter into new commitments. Third, the rigid divide between Annex
I and non-Annex I countries had made it difficult to deal with the rapidly rising
emissions of emerging economies that did not want to stifle their future economic
development by imposing limits on future emissions.
Although seen as a failure at the time, the 2009 Copenhagen conference (COP-15)
succeeded in laying the ground for a new approach that has now come to fruition
in the Paris Agreement.10 After two weeks of fruitless negotiations by diplomats
and regulatory experts at COP-15, a select group of heads of state hammered
out a political compromise deal, the Copenhagen Accord, which foreshadowed
many of the elements now contained in the Paris Agreement. Sidestepping the
thorny issue of internationally agreed and legally binding emissions targets,
Barack Obama for the United States, Wen Jiabao for China, Manmohan Singh for
India and other world leaders agreed to a system of voluntary pledges as the basis
for future climate action. For the first time, major emitters from the developing
world showed a willingness to contribute to the global mitigation effort without
waiting for developed countries to fully implement their existing commitments.
The Copenhagen Accord thus finally did away with the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘firewall’
between Annex I and non-Annex I countries, paving the way for a more compre-
hensive mitigation deal. Copenhagen also saw the beginning of other innovations
in climate policy, from the Green Climate Fund and a promise of up to US$100
billion a year by 2020 of climate finance to fund mitigation and adaptation in
developing countries to a system for monitoring, reporting and verification of
emissions and financial contributions.
Developments at the subnational and regional levels are key to understanding
the gradual transformation that has occurred in international climate politics.
While concern over climate change was on the rise throughout the 2000s, it was
towards the end of the decade that critical momentum was built for a global agree-
ment. Even in countries that had been laggards in the international negotiations,
such as the United States, a groundswell of bottom-up initiatives had begun to
change the political agenda.11 Around the world, local community groups have
sprung up to advance voluntary carbon emission reductions; multinational
10
Robert Falkner, Hannes Stephan and John Vogler, ‘International climate policy after Copenhagen: towards a
“building blocks” approach’, Global Policy 1: 3, Oct. 2010, pp. 252–62.
11
Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer, ‘Climate change regionalism in North America’, Review of Policy
Research 28: 3, 2011, pp. 295–304.
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Robert Falkner
corporations have increasingly invested in low-carbon business opportunities
and adopted corporate social responsibility approaches with an explicit focus on
climate change; institutional investors have begun to demand greater transpar-
ency on climate risks in business operations; and subnational authorities such as
cities and municipal governing bodies have taken it upon themselves to create
climate mitigation pledges and policies.12 Increasingly, these bottom-up initiatives
have come together in transnational networks that coordinate their activities and
promote diffusion of climate policies throughout the world. The trend towards
transnationalization of climate initiatives, which gathered pace particularly from
the early 2000s, has embedded climate policy more deeply in the domestic agenda
of leading emitters, has helped spread low-carbon policy approaches and technol-
ogies around the world, and is stimulating a growing interest in innovative global
solutions.13
The growth in transnational initiatives has gone hand in hand with strength-
ened domestic policy commitments to climate change mitigation. The first
comprehensive review of climate legislation found that the number of climate
change laws and policies worldwide had doubled every five years since 1997, with
426 climate change laws and policies in place by the time of the 2009 Copenhagen
conference, rising to 804 by the end of 2014.14 Interestingly, this applies not just
to Annex I countries, which have traditionally led the way in climate legisla-
tion, but also to non-Annex I countries.15 The effects of this change in domestic
politics can be seen in China, which became the world’s largest emitter of carbon
dioxide in 2006. Not least in response to growing domestic concern over extreme
air pollution, but arguably also in response to external pressure, China’s polit-
ical leadership established the reduction of the economy’s energy intensity and
climate intensity as key targets in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011–15), in line with
commitments made at the 2009 Copenhagen summit. The 13th Five Year Plan
(2016–20) is set to expand the range of policy instruments aimed at controlling
emissions.16 In 2014, China made the largest investment in renewable energy
sources of any country in the world, estimated at US$83.3 billion—more than
double the United States’ investment of US$38.3 million that year.17 The ground-
swell of domestic climate action has made it more likely that major emitters will
12
Matthew J. Hoffmann, Climate governance at the crossroads: experimenting with a global response after Kyoto (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 7–8.
13
Harriet Bulkeley, Liliana Andonova, Michele M. Betsill, Daniel Compagnon, Thomas Hale, Matthew J. Hoff-
mann, Peter Newell, Matthew Paterson, Charles Roger and Stacy D. VanDeveer, Transnational climate change
governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
14
Michal Nachmany, Sam Fankhauser, Jana Davidová, Nick Kingsmill, Tucker Landesman, Hitomi Roppongi,
Philip Schleifer, Joana Setzer, Amelia Sharman, C. Stolle Singleton, Jayaraj Sundaresan and Terry Townshend,
The 2015 global climate legislation study: a review of climate change legislation in 99 countries. Summary for policy-makers
(London: Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, 2015), p. 12.
15
Nachmany et al., The 2015 global climate legislation study, p. 20.
16
Fergus Green and Nicholas Stern, ‘China’s changing economy: implications for its carbon dioxide emissions’,
Climate Policy, forthcoming in print but available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1469
3062.2016.1156515?journalCode=tcpo20.
17
UNEP, Global trends in renewable energy investment 2015 (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt School–UNEP Collabo-
rating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance, UNEP and Bloomberg New Energy Finance,
2015), http://fs-unep-centre.org/sites/default/files/attachments/key_findings.pdf.
1112

contribute to a collective international effort, even if most continue to oppose
mandatory emissions reductions.
One important factor behind this shift is the growing recognition among major
polluters that the obstacles to a low-carbon energy transition are not as high as
had been previously thought. As more and more emission-reducing and energy-
saving policies have been put in place, gradual technological improvements,
market competition and greater economies of scale have pushed down the costs
of low-carbon technologies. Solar photovoltaic energy, for example, has become
a cost-effective energy source in many parts of the world. The cost of photo-
voltaic modules has fallen by an average rate of about 10 per cent per year since
1980,18 and the fall in solar energy prices has speeded up more recently as China
has ramped up solar-cell production from 50 megawatts of generation capacity in
2004 to 23,000 megawatts in 2012.19 Thanks to falling unit costs and rising overall
investment, renewable energy sources contributed almost half of the new power
generation capacity added worldwide in 2014.20 Achieving a rapid reduction in
emissions is still perceived by many states as a costly affair, but major emitters
have grown more confident that a gradual shift towards a low-carbon economy
will not necessarily harm their long-term growth strategies. This shift in attitudes
was clearly visible in the run-up to the 2015 Paris climate summit. Having already
agreed at the Copenhagen summit to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy,
the Chinese government now signalled that it was willing to commit to no further
rise in GHG emissions after 2030.21 The United States, too, has indicated a greater
willingness to work with the international community to achieve significant
emissions reductions. Benefiting from a switch towards shale gas and a reversal of
previous emissions trends, the US administration under President Obama is now
using existing regulatory authorities to shift energy production away from coal.22
It was in the context of these domestic political and economic shifts that the
preparations for the 2015 Paris climate conference gathered momentum. The
French presidency sought to keep expectations comparatively low to avoid any
repetition of the emotional rollercoaster that the 2009 Copenhagen conference
produced. Could Paris produce the breakthrough compromise the world was
waiting for? The next section provides a brief review of the agreement that was
reached at COP-21, and the subsequent section then examines whether the new
logic of internationally coordinated national action can bring about the required
push for reduced GHG emissions.
18
J. Doyne Farmer and François Lafond, ‘How predictable is technological progress?’, Research Policy 45: 3, 2016,
pp. 647–65.
19
Ed Crooks and Lucy Hornby, ‘Sunshine revolution: the age of solar power’, Financial Times, 5 Nov. 2015,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/488483ca-8334-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd.html#slide0.
20
International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2015: executive summary (Paris, 2015), p. 1, https://www.iea.
org/Textbase/npsum/WEO2015SUM.pdf.
21
Green and Stern, ‘China’s changing economy’.
22
Guri Bang, ‘The United States: Obama’s push for climate policy change’, in Guri Bang, Arild Underdal and
Steinar Andresen, eds, The domestic politics of global climate change: key actors in international climate cooperation
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2015), pp. 160–81.
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Robert Falkner
Phoenix from the ashes: the 2015 Paris Agreement

Scarred by the experience of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, negotiators entered
the COP-21 talks with a clearer sense of purpose and determination to reach an
agreement. The Danish presidency having been widely blamed for mishandling the
negotiations in Copenhagen,23 the French presidency prepared the ground with a
more inclusive approach, skilfully reaching out to a wide range of actors—govern-
ments, business leaders and NGOs—in the preparatory meetings for COP-21.
When the conference itself opened on 30 November 2015, most negotiators and
observers were optimistic about reaching an agreement, despite a long list of crit-
ical issues that still needed to be resolved. The presence of over 100 heads of state
at the beginning of the summit underlined just how much climate change had
gained in salience on the international agenda; and when French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius brought down the gavel late on Saturday, 12 December, one day
later than scheduled, there was a strong sense of historic achievement in the hall.
In all, 196 parties, comprising 195 countries and the European Union, had agreed
to the deal.
To be sure, the Paris negotiations benefited from skilled diplomacy. However,
they would not have been such a success had the parties not aimed for a decen-
tralized, bottom-up process of voluntary pledges. Because of the shift away from
Kyoto-style top-down regulations, major emitters that had previously blocked
progress in the negotiations were now prepared openly to support the new agree-
ment. This new unity in purpose was already on show in November 2014, when
the United States and China, the world’s two biggest emitters of GHGs, signed
a bilateral agreement on climate change that foreshadowed their later pledges in
the run-up to the Paris summit.24 Other major emitters likewise came forward to
make their own pledges. No responsible Great Power wanted to be left out of the
newly emerged climate consensus.
One of the positive outcomes of this new approach was the transformation
in the international process that allowed the parties to achieve important break-
throughs such as the inclusion of a more ambitious temperature target. The Paris
Agreement commits parties to ‘holding the increase in the global average temper-
ature to well below 2°C’ (article 2(1)a).25 It was only after Pacific island states
demanded a reduction in the target to 1.5°C, a demand that civil society groups
also supported, that an additional clause was added stating parties’ commitment
‘to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial
levels’. The Paris Agreement thus goes beyond the previously agreed 2°C target,
even though 1.5°C remains an aspiration rather than a prescription.
23
For an analysis of the role of negotiation management in the Copenhagen conference, see Kai Monheim,
How effective negotiation management promotes multilateral cooperation: the power of process in climate, trade, and biosafety
negotiations (London: Routledge, 2014).
24
Lenore Taylor and Tania Branigan, ‘US and China strike deal on carbon cuts in push for global climate change
pact’, Guardian, 12 Nov. 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/12/china-and-us-make-
carbon-pledge.
25
Paris Agreement, FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1, https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09r01.pdf.
1114

Significantly, the Paris Agreement also includes a long-term emissions goal, a
key demand by civil society groups and developing countries.26 Article 4(1) states
that ‘Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as
possible’ and to achieve ‘a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources
and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century’. The
notion of emissions balance, which was referred to in an earlier draft of the treaty
as ‘emissions neutrality’, suggests that GHG emissions will need to come down
to a ‘net zero’ level between 2050 and 2100; UNEP had previously called for this
to be achieved for CO2 emissions by 2070.27 In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol,
which lacked long-term targets, the Paris Agreement thus sends an important
signal to global markets, and especially to institutional investors, though it is
weakened by the lack of a specific timetable and uncertainty over the future use
of carbon sinks. Achieving the Paris goals will require global investment in carbon
sequestration programmes, but large-scale afforestation is bound to create food
security concerns, while the technical and economic viability of carbon capture
and storage remains uncertain.
In order to achieve long-term emissions reductions, the Paris Agreement
obliges parties to submit pledges—so-called ‘nationally determined contribu-
tions’ (NDCs)—on a regular basis. It is this reliance on countries’ voluntary
climate policy ambition that marks the most significant departure from the
Kyoto Protocol approach. Rather than establishing a set of quantitative emissions
reductions that are internationally agreed, the Paris Agreement sidesteps the
distributional conflict inherent in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations by leaving it
to individual countries to determine how much they wish to contribute to the
collective mitigation effort. NDCs are to be submitted at regular intervals of five
years (article 4(9)), and the agreement expects new pledges to exceed the ambition
of existing ones so as to raise the climate ambition overall. That such a progression
of climate policy ambition will be needed is clear from the 160 ‘intended’ NDCs
that were submitted as part of the effort to create political momentum behind the
Paris negotiations. According to Climate Action Tracker estimates, these pledges
are insufficient to prevent global temperatures from rising beyond 2°C; indeed,
they are projected to lead to global warming of 2.7°C or more.28
The main mechanism for raising the level of ambition in the climate regime
will be a regular review of progress made towards the agreement’s temperature
goal. A first interim review, known as the ‘facilitative dialogue’, will take place in
2018, prior to the agreement’s expected entry into force. The first formal review,
referred to in the agreement as the ‘global stocktake’ (article 14(1)), is scheduled
for 2023, with subsequent iterations every five years thereafter. The outcome of
these reviews is meant to inform parties as they formulate future NDCs, with a
26
Michael Jacobs, ‘High pressure for low emissions: how civil society created the Paris climate agreement’,
Juncture 22: 4, 2016, pp. 314–23.
27
UNEP, The emissions gap report 2014: a UNEP synthesis report (Nairobi: UNEP, 2014), p. xv.
28
‘INDCs lower projected warming to 2.7°C: significant progress but still above 2°C’, Climate Action Tracker,
1 Oct. 2015, http://climateactiontracker.org/news/224/indcs-lower-projected-warming-to-2.7c-significant-
progress-but-still-above-2c-.html. UNEP estimates a higher global warming trajectory of 3.5°C (UNEP, The
emissions gap report 2015, p. xviii).
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Robert Falkner
view to ‘updating and enhancing’ their pledges (article 14(3)). By establishing a
system of mandatory national reporting, which includes information on national
emissions by sources and removals of GHGs by carbon sinks, the Paris Agreement
makes transparency a key regulatory instrument aimed at building trust between
the parties and enabling them to review the implementation of national pledges
(article 13).
In a second major break with the regulatory approach of the Kyoto Protocol,
the Paris Agreement includes all countries in its mitigation effort. Whereas the
Kyoto treaty placed obligations to reduce emissions only on the Annex I (industri-
alized) countries, the new agreement obliges all emitters to take nationally deter-
mined action to limit global warming. First foreshadowed in the Copenhagen
Accord of 2009, this new inclusiveness represents a major advance in the inter-
national climate negotiations, which have hitherto been characterized by a deep
North–South divide over how to interpret the UNFCCC principle of ‘common
but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’.29 The Paris Agree-
ment still retains a degree of differentiation, which helped secure the support
of developing countries. Whereas developed countries ‘shall continue taking the
lead by undertaking economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets’, devel-
oping countries ‘should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts’ and are only
‘encouraged’ to move over time towards the kind of emissions reduction or limita-
tion targets that apply to the industrialized countries (article 4(4)). Individual
countries can take their economic circumstances into account in deciding where
on this sliding scale from ‘mitigation efforts’ to ‘absolute emission reduction
targets’ their NDCs should be located. This means that, in principle, emerging
economies whose emissions rise in line with economic growth can no longer hide
behind their official developing country status and are expected to make a bigger
contribution to global climate change mitigation—a key demand made by the
United States and other leading industrialized countries.30
Developing countries succeeded in their demands that the Paris Agreement
establish adaptation to climate change alongside mitigation as a ‘global goal’ (arti-
cle 7(1)). The provisions in article 7 strengthen the existing adaptation framework,
among other means by subjecting national adaptation policies to the five-yearly
review mechanism. The new agreement thus reinforces the growing recognition
that climate change increasingly poses a challenge especially to poorer societies,
as failure to reduce emissions quickly is locking in dangerous global warming for
decades to come. The parties also recognize that ‘support for and international
cooperation on adaptation efforts’ are needed (article 7(6)), thereby underlining the
importance that international climate finance will play in helping developing coun-
tries to adapt to a warming climate. Developing countries scored a further victory
in having the concept of ‘loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of
29
Lavanya Rajamani, ‘The changing fortunes of differential treatment in the evolution of international envi-
ronmental law’, International Affairs 88: 3, May 2012, pp. 605–23.
30
Andrew Hurrell and Sandeep Sengupta, ‘Emerging powers, North–South relations and global climate poli-
tics’, International Affairs 88: 3, May 2012, pp. 463–84.
1116

climate change’ established alongside adaptation (article 8).31 However, developed
country governments were adamant in their opposition to the creation of any legal
liability or rights to compensation arising from this provision, thereby blunting
the practical effect that this new provision in the climate treaty is likely to have.
As in previous negotiation rounds, the provisions on finance proved to be
among the most contentious issues in the Paris conference. Developing countries
demanded clear rules and firm commitments on financial aid for climate change
mitigation and adaptation. Developed countries, having already promised up
to US$100 billion annually in climate finance by 2020, were keen to ensure that
wealthier emerging economies would also contribute to climate finance and to
avoid entering into legally binding commitments to specific funding flows. The
Paris outcome is based on a broad compromise, calling upon developed countries
to provide finance that ‘should represent a progression beyond previous efforts’,
setting a floor of US$100 billion annually to be mobilized after 2025, and including
a new bi-annual requirement for developed countries to ‘communicate indicative
quantitative and qualitative information ... including projected levels of public
financial resources to be provided to developing country Parties’ (article 9(5)).
At the same time, the agreement does not include any legally binding figures on
financial assistance but continues to refer to ‘mobilizing climate finance from a
wide variety of sources, instruments and channels’ (article 9(3)). It also encourages
‘other Parties ... to provide such support voluntarily’ (article 9(2)), thus opening
the door for greater financial contributions from China and other emerging
economies.
One of the key reasons why it was possible to establish broad support for
the Paris deal was the carefully crafted legal structure for the agreement, which
leaves important provisions either in a state of imprecision, or unenforceable, or
out of reach of domestic courts. That the Paris Agreement would be an interna-
tional treaty, in accordance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties,
had become clear in the preparatory meetings leading up to the Paris summit.32
However, not least to satisfy longstanding demands by the United States, the
Paris Agreement leaves it open to individual countries to decide whether ratifica-
tion by parliament or executive decision by government is needed for them to
accede to the treaty (article 20). Furthermore, the careful wording of key provi-
sions ensures that only some create legal obligations (‘shall’) while others merely
express recommendations (‘should’) or create expressions of intent or opinion
(‘will’, ‘recognize’).33 Thus, once the agreement has entered into force, parties will
31
COP-19 in 2013 had already established the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated
with Climate Change Impacts.
32
Daniel Bodansky, ‘The legal character of the Paris Agreement’, Review of European, Comparative, and Inter-
national Environmental Law, p. 6, forthcoming in print but available online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
doi/10.1111/reel.12154/abstract.
33
Bodansky, ‘The legal character of the Paris Agreement’, pp. 6–7. As was widely reported, last-minute wran-
gling over the use of the word ‘shall’ instead of ‘should’ in a single clause of the draft text nearly derailed the
adoption of the treaty, until the French presidency declared that a ‘typo’ was to blame for the erroneous use
of ‘shall’: see John Vidal, ‘How a “typo” nearly derailed the Paris climate deal’, Guardian, 16 Dec. 2015, http://
www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2015/dec/16/how-a-typo-nearly-derailed-the-paris-climate-deal.
1117

Robert Falkner
be legally obliged to submit NDCs and report on them every five years, but failure
to comply with their own national climate plans will not constitute a breach of
international law. In any case, the agreement’s compliance mechanism is explicitly
designed to ‘be expert-based and facilitative in nature and function in a manner
that is transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive’ (article 15(2)). Even where
parties are in breach of treaty provisions, they will not face punitive sanctions as
they might in other international agreements such as those of the WTO.
The question, therefore, is not whether the Paris Agreement is legally binding
or not, as some observers have argued.34 The issue is whether, given its peculiar
legal structure, which restricts legal obligations primarily to procedural questions
and leaves decisions on how much countries contribute to the global climate effort
in their own hands, it can make a difference to the global effort to avert dangerous
climate change. In the next section, I examine the logic of nationally determined
climate action in an effort to shed light on what is bound to be the critical question
for international climate policy: how can the Paris Agreement stimulate more
ambitious, and effective, mitigation efforts by all major emitters?
Can it work? The new logic of domestically driven climate action

The Paris Agreement represents a significant departure from the regulatory
approach of the Kyoto Protocol and the beginning of a new phase in interna-
tional climate politics. To be sure, the key elements of the Paris deal had been in
the making for some time, including at the 2009 Copenhagen conference and the
2011 Durban conference. But given the relative novelty of the Paris Agreement’s
approach—not to mention the vagueness of many of its key provisions—it is
difficult to assess at this point what effect it is likely to have. That some observers
have already written off the new treaty is unsurprising, not least when we consider
the unprecedented complexity of the task of decarbonizing the global economy.35
But if we accept that most global governance offers only second-best or ‘good
enough’ solutions,36 certain innovative elements of the agreement can be identi-
fied that hold the promise of improving on regulatory practice to date. It will be
important to understand, therefore, under what conditions the new regulatory
logic can work.
In assessing the Paris Agreement, it is important to bear in mind the nature
of the global policy challenge. More than two decades after the adoption of the
UNFCCC, it is becoming much clearer that effective climate policy is not about
finding quick fixes to an emissions problem but about putting in place the structure
for a long-term technological and economic transformation. Averting dangerous
34
Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘The Paris approach to global governance’, Project-Syndicate, 28 Dec. 2015, https://
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/paris-agreement-model-for-global-governance-by-anne-marie-
slaughter-2015-12.
35
Tom Bawden, ‘COP-21: Paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change, academics warn’,
Independent, 8 Jan. 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cop21-paris-deal-far-
too-weak-to-prevent-devastating-climate-change-academics-warn-a6803096.html.
36
Stewart Patrick, ‘The unruled world: the case for good enough global governance’, Foreign Affairs 93: 1, 2014,
pp. 58–73.
1118

global warming will require major investment in low-carbon technologies and a
redesign of existing transport and urban infrastructures. To add to the complexity
of the task, all of this will need to be achieved on a global scale and sustained over
decades. Any expectation, therefore, that a single international summit or treaty
could provide the breakthrough solution, was always illusory.37 The question now
is not whether the Paris Agreement will ‘fix’ global warming, but whether it
provides a robust yet adaptable framework for developing and sustaining long-
term political commitment to an effective global response. The Paris conference
will therefore be judged to have been a success if it creates the right mix of incen-
tives to make a transition towards a low-carbon global economy more likely.
The first thing to note is that the Paris Agreement promises a more realistic path
towards globally coordinated emissions reductions, mainly because it has managed
to better align international climate policy with the realities of international climate
politics. The Paris Agreement gets out of the cul-de-sac of the Kyoto Protocol
approach by removing two major structural barriers to international cooperation.
First, it accepts that most major emitters are reluctant to tie themselves into a rigid
set of predetermined emissions reductions that are legally binding. This reluctance
was at the heart of the US decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol; it was also
evident in emerging economies’ disinclination to take on quantified targets for
mitigation measures. Second, it sidesteps the distributional conflict that is inherent
in any attempt to negotiate mitigation targets as part of a comprehensive interna-
tional agreement. The difficulty of devising a fair burden-sharing arrangement is
one important reason why the negotiations on a post-Kyoto climate treaty ended
in failure.
While this transformation of the international process on climate change mitiga-
tion lies at the heart of the COP-21 outcome, it is worth reminding ourselves that
Paris did not invent the new logic of climate politics as such. It merely rationalizes
an already emerging system of domestically driven climate policy. For several
years, a gap had been growing between the inertia and gridlock that characterized
the multilateral negotiations and the increasingly active field of climate policy
experimentation at national level. Although the Kyoto Protocol created legally
binding obligations for major industrialized countries when it entered into force in
2005, in reality it failed to play a significant role in driving most of these countries’
domestic climate policies.38 For some (e.g. Russia, Canada and Australia), Kyoto
had next to no effect on national emissions paths, while others (e.g. Japan) gradu-
ally drifted away from the treaty. The EU was arguably the only group of major
emitters that remained committed to implementing its commitments under the
treaty; but even in Europe’s case it is difficult to argue that international treaty
obligations rather than domestic pressures and concerns were the main driver of
climate policy. In any case, with Canada, Russia and Japan having withdrawn
from the treaty’s second commitment period, the Kyoto Protocol now covers no
37
Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor, ‘Cooperation and discord in global climate policy’, Nature Climate
Change 6: 6, 2016, pp. 570–75.
38
See the contributions on major emitters’ climate policies in Bang et al., eds, The domestic politics of global climate
change.
1119

Robert Falkner
more than 15 per cent of global GHG emissions. Yet, paradoxically, while the
Kyoto Protocol has gradually fallen out of favour, most major emitters have if
anything stepped up domestic efforts to bring emissions under control. The key
difference is that they have chosen policies that reflect domestic, rather than inter-
national, priorities and circumstances.
To some extent, therefore, the Paris Agreement offers a more realistic chance of
governments implementing their NDCs because climate change has become a firmly
established part of public policy around the world. Nearly all major emitters of
GHGs have established laws and regulations dealing with emission controls, energy
efficiency standards, forestry management and low-carbon technological innova-
tion. In total, nearly 500 laws related to climate change have been introduced since
1990.39 However, while there is a uniform trend towards greater legislative action
on climate change, the drivers behind countries’ climate policies vary considerably.
To some extent, material factors provide a reliable proxy explanation of a country’s
stance on climate change. Differences in countries’ level of economic develop-
ment, resource endowment and exposure to climate impacts explain why rela-
tively poor, low-lying, island states without fossil fuel reserves (e.g. the Maldives)
favour strict international mitigation policies and international financing of local
adaptation measures, while relatively wealthy countries whose economies depend
on the exploitation of fossil fuels (e.g. Saudi Arabia) tend to oppose global curbs
on GHG emissions. For most other countries, which find themselves in between
these two extreme cases, the situation is more complex. The costs resulting from
climate change impacts and mitigation measures tend to be unevenly distributed
within most societies, which makes it difficult to apply straightforward calculations
of aggregate cost and benefit to explain national climate policy stances. Significant
roles are played by other factors too, such as societal perceptions of climate risk,
environmental values, sectoral business interests and political institutions. Increas-
ingly, climate policies are also driven by so-called ‘non-climate co-benefits’, as in
the case of Chinese restrictions on coal-fired energy production owing to domestic
concern over high levels of urban air pollution.
The Paris Agreement follows this trend in soliciting domestically determined
mitigation pledges, but adds an important international dimension to this ground-
swell of domestic climate action. As Keohane and Oppenheimer argue, Paris is
designed to create a peculiar ‘two-level game’ logic that connects domestic climate
politics with strategic interaction between countries.40 By subjecting domestically
determined mitigation pledges to the international review mechanism, the Paris
Agreement ensures that the gap between the required level of action and the total
sum of national measures becomes the subject of international policy deliberation
and coordination. Paris turns what would otherwise be a decentralized, bottom-
up policy-making approach into a hybrid system that combines bottom-up with
top-down elements.
39
Nachmany et al., The 2015 global climate legislation study.
40
Robert O. Keohane and Michael Oppenheimer, ‘Paris: beyond the climate dead end through pledge and
review?’, Politics and Governance, forthcoming, available at http://www.cogitatiopress.com/ojs/index.php/
politicsandgovernance/index.
1120

For this hybrid system to work, the Paris Agreement needs to put in place
a transparency regime that makes national policies internationally comparable.
Transparency is a key condition for making national pledges credible and building
trust between major emitters. In this respect, the Paris conference delivered mixed
results at best. While it brings us one step closer to comparable mitigation pledges
and policies, laying down principles for an integrated reporting system that has
been in the making for some time under the auspices of the UNFCCC, it did not
deliver the specific rules that will govern the monitoring, reporting and verifi-
cation of emissions and national implementation of those pledges and policies.
Given that many countries have been wary of ceding control over what and how
they report to the UNFCCC, it will take considerable effort at future COPs to
negotiate the modalities of the new transparency regime.
Getting transparency right will be of critical importance to the Paris Agreement’s
review mechanism, which is the central tool for driving up ambition within the
UNFCCC regime. The review mechanism is likely to generate pressure on states
in two ways. The first is peer pressure among states. At the five-yearly review
sessions, the parties to the Paris Agreement will ideally be able to establish which
countries have delivered on their previous pledges and whether new and more
ambitious pledges are needed to meet the temperature target. The formalized
review process will create regular moments for ‘naming and shaming’ strategies
to be deployed against those countries that fall short of international expectations.
Given that mitigation pledges will be determined independently by each party
and cannot be enforced through the regime’s compliance mechanism, interna-
tional review and peer pressure will be the main multilateral tools for parties to
strengthen the credibility of their pledges. In an ideal scenario, leaders in climate
policy will use the review mechanism to signal high ambition and exhort laggards
to raise their game, in the hope that successful implementation of voluntary
pledges will create a positive spiral of strengthening trust and enhanced coopera-
tion. A more pessimistic scenario is also possible, however. Regular reviews may
reveal wide gaps between countries’ mitigation pledges and national implementa-
tion, creating a downward spiral of weakening trust and lower ambition.
It is not unusual for global governance to combine a transparency regime with
peer pressure. Such an approach rests on the idea that, as Ian Johnstone argues,
‘states care about collective judgment of their conduct because they have an interest
in reciprocal compliance by and future cooperation with others’.41 Naming and
shaming mechanisms operate within diverse global governance contexts, from the
International Labour Organization to human rights bodies and corporate social
responsibility institutions.42 They are usually seen as a fallback mechanism where
formal compliance and enforcement procedures are unavailable or fail to work.
In the case of climate change as in other areas, the effectiveness of peer pressure
will depend on two factors: first, the degree to which governments are sensitive
41
Ian Johnstone, ‘The power of interpretative communities’, in Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, eds,
Power in global governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 187.
42
Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, ‘Sticks and stones: naming and shaming the human rights enforcement problem’,
International Organization 62: 4, 2008, pp. 689–716.
1121

Robert Falkner
to international opprobrium and reputational loss; and second, the number of
countries that are non-compliant or fail to live up to international expectations.
Unfortunately, the past record of international climate politics offers little comfort
in this respect. Time and again, major emitters have shown themselves willing to
accept a loss in international reputation when domestic economic priorities have
been at stake. The United States, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide
until 2006, was the only industrialized country that refused to ratify the Kyoto
Protocol. Having withdrawn its signature from the treaty in 2001, the US stood
firm in its opposition to mandatory emissions reductions despite facing universal
condemnation.43 Canada likewise ignored international protests when it became
the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. And at the Copen-
hagen conference in 2009, emerging economies such as China and India success-
fully resisted international pressure to subject their economies to internationally
agreed mitigation targets. It should be noted, however, that in all these instances
major emitters not only chose domestic priorities over international concerns but
actively challenged the idea of internationally agreed and legally binding emissions
reduction targets. The Paris Agreement provides a different context in which
major emitters can set their own targets but need to account for their actions
internationally. With all major emitters having committed to making the Paris
deal work, the enhanced legitimacy of the agreement should, therefore, increase
most countries’ sense of obligation and responsibility, though it is unlikely that
this alone will override conflicting domestic interests.
The second mechanism on which the Paris Agreement’s review system relies is
naming and shaming by civil society. When reporting on their national emissions
and implementation of international pledges, governments also face scrutiny by
environmental campaign groups and media organizations. Much of this scrutiny
happens in a domestic context, but it is also exercised by NGOs operating transna-
tionally. After all, NDCs have an important signalling effect to domestic constitu-
encies, indicating a government’s green credentials at home and environmental
leadership internationally. Some governments will also move to enshrine inter-
national pledges in domestic legislation, thereby exposing themselves to more
systematic domestic scrutiny through parliaments and courts. Some NGOs already
perform a quasi-monitoring role in climate politics. Environmental organizations
such as the World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker and Civil Society
Review already provide important data and analysis on global emissions trends
and national performance. In the run-up to the Paris summit they highlighted the
gap between what countries had pledged in their Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions (INDCs) and the level of collective action that would be consistent
with the 2°C target.44 Once the Paris Agreement enters into force, civil society
organizations can be expected to continue to scrutinize national policies and their
43
Robyn Eckersley, ‘Ambushed: the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration’s climate policy and the erosion
of legitimacy’, International Politics 44: 2–3, 2007, pp. 306–24; Robert Falkner, ‘American hegemony and the
global environment’, International Studies Review 7: 4, 2005, pp. 585–99.
44
Oxfam, ‘Fair shares: a civil society equity review of INDCs’, Oct. 2015, https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/
fair-shares-civil-society-equity-review-indcs.
1122

implementation, and to calculate the world’s remaining carbon budget and the
additional efforts states will need to make to stay within this budget. As in other
contexts, civil society can therefore be expected to take on the role of informal
monitor of the climate agreement, using naming and shaming tactics to target
those governments that shirk their responsibilities.45
Despite the important role that non-state actors can play in this area, the
outlook for accountability at the hands of civil society is uncertain and highly
uneven. Domestic monitoring of national policies depends on the capacity of
civil society to organize and exert pressure on governments and the degree to
which civil society enjoys a permissive environment domestically. Research on
domestic environmental politics reveals starkly divergent fortunes for environ-
mental NGOs, for example between those operating in democratic states with
open, pluralistic political cultures and those that face tight political control by
autocratic regimes. As Bailey and Tomlinson point out, the ‘safe operating space’
for independent monitoring is shrinking in many countries, and especially ‘in
precisely those countries where [it is] most needed’.46 There are also important
differences in levels of domestic mobilization, engagement and financing of NGO
activities, with the dividing line often falling between richer and poorer societies.
To some extent, transnational campaign groups can substitute for domestic
activism in countries that lack a vibrant civil society.47 Even so, we should not
expect the monitoring ability of civil society to be equally distributed around
the world.
Finally, given that the decarbonization of the global economy will be down
to decisions by economic actors, the Paris Agreement will ultimately be judged
by the effect it has on global markets. International regimes and governmental
regulation can provide a supportive regulatory framework, but it is companies
that decide on the direction of technological innovation, R&D expenditure and
investment flows. In this context, an international treaty such as the Paris Agree-
ment can hope to shape business decisions in three ways: it can send a signal to
markets about the international community’s long-term political objectives; it can
put in place governance mechanisms that create incentives for low-carbon business
decisions; and it can encourage and support voluntary efforts by private actors.
With regard to signalling, global business leaders had encouraged govern-
ments to create an ambitious climate agreement that would produce certainty for
long-term investment decisions.48 By strengthening the temperature target and
adopting carbon neutrality as the long-term goal, the Paris Agreement does indeed
send a clear signal to global markets, marking out the long-term direction of travel
for the global economy. However, the lack of detail on the time-frame for and
45
Christopher L. Pallas and Johannes Urpelainen, ‘NGO monitoring and the legitimacy of international coop-
eration: a strategic analysis’, Review of International Organizations 7: 1, 2011, pp. 1–32.
46
Rob Bailey and Shane Tomlinson, ‘Post-Paris: taking forward the global climate change deal’, briefing,
London, Chatham House, 2016, p. 10.
47
Amanda Murdie and Johannes Urpelainen, ‘Why pick on us? Environmental INGOs and state shaming as a
strategic substitute’, Political Studies 63: 2, 2015, pp. 353–72.
48
Madeleine Cuff, ‘Global CEOs issue rallying call for “ambitious” COP-21 deal’, businessGreen, 23 Nov. 2015,
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2435987/global-ceos-issue-rallying-call-for-ambitious-cop21-deal.
1123

Robert Falkner
pathway towards long-term carbon neutrality has weakened the signal. Further-
more, the Paris Agreement put in place a framework for creating governance
mechanisms, but postponed the tricky task of agreeing specific rules. The parties
renewed international support for developing and expanding carbon markets,
endorsing the creation of a new type of carbon asset, so-called ‘internationally
transferred mitigation outcomes’. They also established an UNFCCC-governed
mechanism that will support international transfers of emission reductions, but
without agreeing the specific rules and procedures that will govern it; these will
need to be agreed by future COPs. And finally, the Paris conference became
a catalyst for the creation of a wide range of voluntary initiatives that engage
business actors and others in collaborative efforts to reduce emissions, promote
best-practice models and encourage technology transfer.49 In this way, the Paris
accord can become an ‘orchestrator’ of climate action well beyond the realm of
traditional international governance, drawing on the governance capabilities of
other actors that the climate regime itself lacks.50
Notwithstanding all these positive elements, it is clear that within the new logic
of nationally determined climate action, the Paris Agreement cannot be expected
to ‘fix’ the climate problem; it can only provide a supportive framework within
which states and other actors can achieve the required emissions cuts.
Conclusions
The COP-21 outcome has been rightly welcomed as a major breakthrough in
international climate diplomacy. After years of fruitless efforts to strike a global
deal on mandatory emissions reductions, the new regulatory approach adopted by
the Paris Agreement managed to transform the international negotiations from
a distributional conflict over legally binding targets into a bottom-up process of
voluntary mitigation pledges. By allowing countries to determine their mitiga-
tion efforts independently, it removed a key barrier that had held back the post-
Kyoto negotiations. At the same time, the new climate treaty obliges emitters to
report on the implementation of their pledges and review their actions at regular
intervals, with a view to creating political momentum for a strengthening of
mitigation efforts. In this way, the Paris Agreement hopes to create what might be
called ‘soft reciprocity’, whereby leading states initiate ambitious climate policies
that encourage others to reciprocate by raising their own level of ambition. In a
context where national mitigation pledges are not legally binding and cannot be
enforced, the main currencies of international climate politics will thus be political
leadership, financial assistance and moral suasion.
Whether the Paris Agreement can produce the desired effect of boosting the
global mitigation effort remains to be seen. This critically depends on whether its
core mechanism of five-yearly reviews can be made to work. For this to happen,
49
Angel Hsu, Andrew S. Moffat, Amy J. Weinfurter and Jason D. Schwartz, ‘Towards a new climate diplomacy’,
Nature Climate Change 5: 6, 2015, pp. 501–503.
50
Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal and Bernhard Zangl, International organizations as orches-
trators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
1124

a robust transparency framework for the reporting and verification of emissions
reduction pledges and their national implementation will be needed. COP-21
established the principles for this framework, but future negotiations will need
to create specific transparency rules and mechanisms. It also remains to be seen
whether peer pressure between states and ‘naming and shaming’ strategies by
NGOs can nudge recalcitrant states into greater ambition. The Paris negotiations
managed to produce a high level of political mobilization and support on the part
of civil society and business, which in itself is a major achievement. But it would
take only a small number of large emitters to derail global efforts to stay within the
temperature target of below 2°C. Given that the world is currently on course for
a global warming trend of 3°C or more, the margin of error for the new climate
regime is worryingly small.
In the context of the new logic of domestically determined climate policy,
much will depend on whether climate leaders are willing and able to push for
more ambitious policies, invest in green technologies and chart the way into a
low-carbon economic future. Such leadership could be provided by states that
seek to move faster and further with decarbonization plans than their peers.
Small groups of states, acting in ‘coalitions of the willing’ or ‘climate clubs’, may
emerge to create regional carbon trading schemes or promote technology transfer
schemes.51 Leadership could also be provided by non-state actors, most notably
business organizations and NGOs that come together to establish transnational
climate actions and voluntarily cooperate to pursue low-carbon strategies. The
Paris Agreement will benefit from such forms of climate leadership, and it can
play an important role in providing a supportive environment in which innovative
initiatives can be encouraged and nurtured.
As should be clear from the above discussion, much of the Paris Agreement’s
potential contribution remains to be developed in future COP negotiations. Paris
was a breakthrough event, but it did not ‘fix’ the climate problem. Nor could it
have hoped to do so. International climate diplomacy has finally caught up with
the reality of the global warming problem, which requires a long-term political
effort to steer global investment in the direction of a low-carbon economic future.
Paris provides a more realistic approach to achieving this vision, but it is not the
end of this journey; in many ways it is only the beginning.
51
Robert Falkner, ‘A minilateral solution for global climate change? On bargaining efficiency, club benefits and
international legitimacy’, Perspectives on Politics 14: 1, 2016, pp. 87–101.
1125

The Paris Agreement and The New Logic of International Climate Politics

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The Paris Agreement and The New Logic of International Climate Politics

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The Paris Agreement and the new logic of

international climate politics

On 12 December 2015, 195 countries reached agreement on a new climate treaty

International Affairs 92: 5 (2016) 1107–1125

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From Copenhagen to Paris: the changing context of climate politics

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Phoenix from the ashes: the 2015 Paris Agreement

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Can it work? The new logic of domestically driven climate action

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